What Only a Full Design System Answers, Not a Component Library
A component library has reusable, implemented Figma and coded components that any team can drop into a new screen.
Per this subject's distinction between a component library and a full design system, what question does the component library alone still fail to answer?
The correct answer is "Who can change a shared component, and how a new pattern gets approved."
This subject's comparison table is explicit: a style guide and a component library both answer "what does it look like" and "can I reuse this piece," but only a full design system answers "who can change this and how" — governance. A component library with no ownership model, no versioning discipline, and no proposal process for new variants degrades into the exact drift problem — five slightly different buttons — it was supposed to prevent, precisely because nobody's actually accountable for keeping it a single source of truth.
The distractors describe things a component library already answers or covers: visual reference values (colors, typography) are answered even by a bare style guide, the least mature of the three tiers; whether a piece can be reused directly is exactly what separates a component library from a style guide in the first place; and whether components exist in Figma is a fact about the artifact, not the governance gap this subject calls out as the real differentiator.
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